Getting A Charge Out of Broadway. Free Summer Stages! The Week in NY Theater

“Well, where can I charge it?” the theatergoer at Hand to God allegedly asked after the usher gave him back his phone. It had been confiscated because he had tried to plug it into a (fake) outlet on the set of the play. (Set designer Beowulf Boritt’s reaction to Charge-Gate: “It’ll keep me from ever putting a toilet on stage.”)

For example, Broadway in Bryant Park starts this week. Broadway in Bryant Park is a FREE concert every Thursday at lunchtime in July and August, featuring the casts performing anywhere from one to three numbers from Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals.

Then there are the many summer theater festivals. This week begins FIVE different summer theater festivals, including the New York Musical Theatre Festival, the Lincoln Center Festival, and the East to Edinburgh Festival (click on link for details.)

The Week in New York Theater Reviews

In “Happy Days,” Samuel Beckett’s bleak but compassionate 1961 play being given a witty, compelling production at The Flea, Brooke Adams as Winnie is buried in a mound of dirt, sometimes with a gun pointed at her head, while behind her, her husband Tony Shalhoub as Willie grunts, or groans, or flips through a browning newspaper, or — in a climactic moment of movement – crawls toward her.

if “Of Good Stock” doesn’t quite go anywhere, it does take us someplace. Those deprived of a weekend beach house getaway will surely marvel at Santo Loquasto’s meticulous, revolving set, which takes us not just to different locations, but cleverly offers us a series of slightly different perspectives on the same locations….Yes, there’s that downside of requiring that we spend time doing very little with some self-involved characters. But isn’t that true of nearly any beach house invitation?

Shows for Days, starring Patti LuPone as a ruthless regional diva and Michael Urie as a sweet stand-in for playwright Douglas Carter Beane, dramatizes Beane’s memories of his introduction to the world of the theatre, which he tells us changed his life. The play is unlikely to change anybody else’s.

The Week in New York Theater News

The Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening, in English and ASL, will begin an 18-week Broadway run at the Brooks Atkinson starting September 8. It will open September 27, and closet January 9th.

Jessica Hecht will play Golde opposite Danny Burstein as Tevye, with Adam Kantor as Motel, in Fiddler on the Roof, opening December 17.

Javier Muñoz, who has been the understudy all along, will play Alexander Hamilton one day a week — at first Saturday matinees, then Sunday matinees, in Hamilton when it begins performances this month on Broadway. It opens August 6.

Ballerina Misty Copeland, who recently became the first African-American woman to be a principal dancer at American Ballet Theater, is heading to Broadway’s ‘On the Town’ as Miss Turnstile, from Aug. 25 to Sept. 6